Saturday, August 29, 2009

New challenge

So finally, a new challenge! As I mentioned in the previous post, it's about concurrency security. I've been too busy (and lazy :P) to put it all together but Gizmore did the job quite well. You can try the challenge here: http://www.wechall.net/challenge/quangcurrency/index.php

This challenge is just a small demonstration of the problem. In real world systems this could be a tricky bug neglected by most developers so probably you can find it everywhere, and if more people look into it there might be chaos. Maybe more demonstration will be coming soon ;)

Saturday, August 1, 2009

2009.1

So Mandriva 2009 Spring Edition (2009.1) has been out for a few months, but I'm too lazy to update it. To be honest, I was quite satisfied with 2009, until recently when Yahoo changed their protocol and my old version Pidgin couldn't connect to their server anymore. A lame reason I know but that was the thing that helped me defeat my laziness and download the new image.

This time, instead of burning the image to dvd, I have decided to mount it locally and use it as an update media. Here's the command to add it to urpmi database:

$ urpmi.addmedia --distrib cdrom /mnt/2009.1/i586/
adding medium ""Mandriva Linux - 2009 Spring (Free) - main" (cdrom1)" before remote medium "Mandriva Linux - 2009.0 (Free) - Installer"
adding medium ""Mandriva Linux - 2009 Spring (Free) - contrib" (cdrom2)" beforeremote medium "Mandriva Linux - 2009.0 (Free) - Installer"
Then the pidgin update:
$ urpmi pidgin
To satisfy dependencies, the following packages are going to be installed:
Package Version Release Arch
(medium ""Mandriva Linux - 2009 Spring (Free) - main" (cdrom1)")
libpurple0 2.5.5 5mdv2009.1 i586
pidgin 2.5.5 5mdv2009.1 i586
pidgin-i18n 2.5.5 5mdv2009.1 i586
pidgin-plugins 2.5.5 5mdv2009.1 i586
1.2MB of additional disk space will be used.
4.9MB of packages will be retrieved.
Proceed with the installation of the 4 packages? (Y/n) y

installing pidgin-i18n-2.5.5-5mdv2009.1.i586.rpm pidgin-plugins-2.5.5-5mdv2009.1.i586.rpm libpurple0-2.5.5-5mdv2009.1.i586.rpm pidgin-2.5.5-5mdv2009.1.i586.rpmfrom /mnt/2009.1/i586/media/main
Preparing... #############################################
1/4: libpurple0 #############################################
2/4: pidgin-plugins #############################################
3/4: pidgin-i18n #############################################
4/4: pidgin #############################################
Unfortunately, the problem with pidgin was only fixed in version 2.5.7. So in the end I had to grab the latest version 2.5.8 off the Internet to get it done.

Maybe tomorrow I'll try updating the kernel next.